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balbec · August 23, 2024, 5:34pm

Mike Lynch obituary: Tech entrepreneur and adviser to David Cameron

Known as ‘the British Bill Gates’, he was involved in a 12-year legal fight with Hewlett-Packard

The Times

Thursday August 22 2024, 4.53pm BST, The Times

Law

Technology

United States

Lynch sold Autonomy to Hewlett-Packard in 2011. His share of the proceeds was estimated at $800 million

DEAN BELCHER FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES

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In May last year Mike Lynch was extradited from Britain to America, where he spent 13 months under house arrest in San Francisco. It was the culmination of a 12-year transatlantic legal fight for the man known as the “British Bill Gates”, who had been science adviser to David Cameron during his time as prime minister.

The case stemmed from the $11.7 billion (£7.4 billion) sale in August 2011 of Autonomy, the business software company Lynch co-founded, to the American tech giant Hewlett-Packard (HP). HP claimed that he had cooked the books, tricking the company into paying $5 billion more than it should have for Autonomy. Lynch maintained his innocence, arguing that the powerful American corporation was suffering from buyer’s remorse.

Lynch had been a research fellow at Cambridge University when he started Autonomy in 1996 with a couple of colleagues. At first it was just a handful of “eccentric people working really hard on a project. No bureaucracy. No admin. Lots of late nights, lots of eating cold pizza.” Approaching his bank manager for funds, he was “told to come back when I was older and had more experience”. Venture capitalists were no better. “There were a lot of City people who didn’t know where the on-switch was on their computers,” he recalled.

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Lynch in Cambridge in 2000

BRYN COLTON/GETTY IMAGES

Instead, Lynch claimed to have raised the money in a chance encounter with an eccentric former pop music promoter in a Soho pub. “He’d never met me before, but he lent me £2,000 on the spot,” he recalled. “I bought a second-hand computer and, completely counter to the Silicon Valley model, funded the business out of operations from then on.”

Another setback came two years later when Autonomy was rejected by the London Stock Exchange because of the company’s “insufficient trading record”. Instead, it was listed on the Easdaq, the European stock exchange in Brussels, before joining the Nasdaq in New York, though here again he encountered resistance. “Software from England?” asked one contact. “That’s where bone china comes from.”

Short, bald and for many years sporting a clipped beard, Lynch was invariably casually dressed and often appeared uncomfortable in social situations. He had a difficult face to read. Explaining what Autonomy did in layman’s terms did not come easily. “People often describe us as a search engine, but only 5 per cent of our revenue comes from that,” he said. The other 95 per cent came from software that can identify and match themes and ideas, sorting mammoth amounts of data to make it easily accessible.

The technology soon moved on from sorting text to sorting voices, which he insisted was not as sinister as it sounds. “Business is done by phoning people and most of those calls these days are recorded. Put all the emails and phone calls together, we can sort the whole lot. It’s going to be a massive market.” Autonomy grew at an exponential rate and was soon being surrounded by opportunists. When HP bid for the company in 2011, Lynch, by then a minority owner, had little choice but to sell. His own share of the proceeds was an estimated $800 million.

HP cried foul in November 2012, announcing an $8.8 billion writedown of assets. The Serious Fraud Office in Britain investigated, but could not find enough evidence to take any action. The US Department of Justice saw things differently and in November 2018 Lynch and Stephen Chamberlain, Autonomy’s former vice-president of finance whose death in a car accident was announced on Monday August 19, were indicted on 17 charges of conspiracy and wire fraud, later reduced to 15. Their position was not helped by a civil case at the High Court in London in which the judge found in HP’s favour, adding that Lynch was a “blunt and dictatorial” executive who “expected to get his way, and did so”.

The merits of Lynch’s extradition case, and the 2003 treaty on which it was undertaken, were hotly debated both in press and in parliament. Nevertheless, he was flown in chains to San Francisco and on March 18 this year went on trial. After 11 weeks the jury retired to consider its verdict, returning two days later with not guilty verdicts, a remarkable accomplishment in a justice system that acquits in only 0.4 per cent of federal trials.

“When you hear that answer, you jump universes,” he told The Sunday Times last month. “If this had gone the wrong way, it would have been the end of life as I have known it in any sense.” His 24-hour armed guard was dismissed, his ankle tag removed and the surveillance cameras installed in every room of the San Francisco mansion to which he was confined were deactivated. “It’s a very strange situation to now be in a different mindset where you’re back,” he added through tears. “I stood on Piccadilly Circus the other day, which has the most enormous permanent traffic jam, and I’m just thinking, ‘This is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen’.”

Michael Richard Lynch was born in 1965 and raised in Ilford, Essex. He was the elder of two sons of Irish immigrants, recalling how at that time the IRA were bombing English cities which meant that “you had to learn to run fast”. His parents were Michael, a firefighter from Co Cork “who advised against earning a living running into burning buildings”, and Dolores, a nurse from Co Tipperary who worked in the same hospital where her son had his first job, as a cleaner. “I’m still a demon mopper,” he added. His mother and his younger brother, a builder, died while he was detained in San Francisco. “They never lived to see this resolved,” he said ruefully.

By the age of seven he had developed an eye for patterns, remembering a television programme about Mopsy, the squirrel. Afterwards, his teacher asked: “Now children, what does Mopsy do next?” No one knew. “I thought, how can these people have watched this and not realise what Mopsy did next?” he said.

At Bancroft’s School, Woodford, he sailed through classes, prompted by the enthusiasm of a science teacher “who liked blowing things up”. He went on to read natural sciences at Christ’s College, Cambridge, before finding employment locally at GEC Marconi, “the dullest, most boring” place to work. Soon he returned to Cambridge for a PhD, producing a thesis on probability that delved into the ideas of Thomas Bayes, the 18th-century Presbyterian minister who was obsessed with using statistics to probe the mind of God.

Lynch in 2002

BEN GURR FOR THE TIMES

He started his first company, Cambridge Neurodynamics, in 1991 and quickly won a contract with South Yorkshire police to design a machine that would match fingerprints. Soon, murders from many years earlier were being solved. “We were fortunate in that we met people who were so intent on their core business of catching criminals that they didn’t care that we weren’t IBM,” he told The Sunday Times. Five years later the technology had progressed, and Autonomy was spun out of Neurodynamics.

Obituaries Thread 🐐

Mike Lynch obituary: Tech entrepreneur and adviser to David Cameron

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